Drug Policy

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for the opportunity to have this debate today. She is a doughty campaigner for drugs reform. She and I have had a number of discussions on different issues in your Lordships’ House and although we may not always agree on policy, I think that we have a very similar goal as regards the drugs issue. I, too, welcome debate and believe that evidence-based policy is extremely important. A wide-ranging and open debate that considers all the options can only be the way forward. If we do not consider all the options we will be doing a disservice to those who are affected by drugs and to their families.

I was also struck by the noble Baroness’s comments on the new psychoactive drugs. We have recently had two areas of debate, in two different Bills, regarding drugs. One of the Bills was on drug driving, and the other was the anti-social behaviour Bill, which deals with the so-called and completely misnamed “legal highs”. One of the things that struck me was the communications that I received from families who had lost somebody. These family members had either died or been seriously ill from using these psychoactive drugs. The situation is horrendous. If you talk to young people now and ask them whether they know where to get these drugs, most will say that they know where to find them.

Unusually for me, I made a few notes before I came into the debate. I wanted first to listen to the debate—which has been very thoughtful—and then make a few observations. I have heard the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, speak before about Portugal, and when she first mentioned it I did not know about the Portuguese examples. I have since read quite a bit about it. There is certainly a great deal of merit in such an approach, and it seems to have successes. This should be fed into any debate that the Government undertake about the kind of approach that could be taken to get people away from drugs, and reduce the associated criminality.

Although the debate is concentrated on the end-user and the value of treatment rather than a punitive approach, we also have to recognise the serious criminality that goes alongside drug dealing. Huge benefits and profits are made by unscrupulous dealers and criminal gangs, who use this money to fund their other activities. It is a trade in absolute misery for others. It has to be a criminal offence; we can never deny that it is such and it should be treated as such. The availability of drugs has to be taken into account, and the point has also been made about prisons. Obviously, there have been some massive police successes and some amazing seizures. In my own county, where we have ports and airports and various ways of entering, there have been a number of seizures of drugs, and yet this does not seem to have a serious impact on the drugs that are available on the ground. This is partly because of the new compounds, the new psychoactive substances that can be manufactured.

Perhaps I was naive as a teenager, but I would not have known where to get drugs. I saw a noble Baroness smile; I do not think I was particularly naive. Talking to youngsters in schools now, I am surprised by the number of them who know far more than I do about this. They have far more knowledge of what is available. They even tell me the prices, which seem to me to be extraordinarily low. This can only be a matter of supply and demand.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, referred to the ping-pong of politics. That is a great shame in a number of ways. Being a party-political hack, I consider that, although sometimes it is impossible to reach agreements between parties, there are areas where there could be far more of that kind of cross-party discussion, which would be very helpful.

I am conscious of time, but I wanted to raise one further point. I felt very sympathetic to the comments that were made in much of the debate, but I would have to put an alternative point of view about removing drugs policy from the Home Office and into the area of health. On face value, I would have considerable sympathy with that, partly because we recognise that treatment works. If you look at the figures, we have a much better record on treatment in this country than in many European countries. The number of opiate users receiving treatment in the UK is 60%, compared to only 12% in the Netherlands and 25% in Sweden. I recognise the enormous value of having health-based policies.

I do not know whether other noble Lords saw a recent article in the Guardian on 25 November. It was written by Paul Hayes, who is a former chief executive of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, which works between the Home Office and the Department of Health. His view is that the only reason why Governments put money into treatment programmes is the criminality which goes alongside so much drug use. In the article, he writes that:

“The government estimates that drug misuse causes £15bn worth of harm to society—£13bn of this being the cost of drug-related crime—dwarfing the £5bn of health harm from smoking”.

His point is that that is one of the drivers which puts money into treatment. There is that driver of the Home Office recognising that this involves aspects of community safety, for example. In contrast, the Department of Health sees ongoing treatments, which are essential for many drug addicts, as being perhaps not the best use of their money. He writes:

“Put simply, the Home Office sees drug treatment as value for money, while the DH sees it as a wasted opportunity”.

He concludes:

“So what may appear at first sight as ‘common sense’, or a more liberal-minded approach to drugs misuse—by treating it as a health issue rather than a criminal activity—would most likely result in drug policy becoming the responsibility of a department”—

he means the Department of Health—

“that isn’t very interested, has a wealth of competing priorities, and a track record of seeking to disinvest from the very intervention that the proposal is designed to promote”.

I am not offering that as my particular view, but I think that it has to be included in the mix if we are looking at evidence-based policy.